If a man's father died in a car crash, and his young son woke up one day and walked from Maine to California to find a job so he could send money back to his mother and baby sister, we would call that young man a hero. Make him Mexican and have him cross a border that has been notional for most of the last few hundred years, and he is a pariah. Make him a child from El Salvador or Guatemala whose parents made a gut-wrenching decision to send that child, alone and afraid, north so that he or she might have a chance to live, perhaps in a better place, and he is suddenly a national crisis, a political chip in a poker game that has been rigged for some time. In this day, when our corporations regularly cross borders and become "residents" of Ireland or Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands, this is hypocrisy at its finest.

My grandfather, born in the United States of immigrant parents from Ireland, was a migrant worker. He left his home in search of work in New England and was a Works Progress Administration laborer and worked as a baker in another state before returning to his home state years later. He moved because that is where the jobs were. John Steinbeck's great novel "The Grapes of Wrath" mentioned how Oklahoma migrants were treated at the "border" of the California state line. They were greeted by mobs with clubs and guns. The fear of someone else taking what little they had drove them. What is it that drives us?

What is it that makes us fear men and women who simply refuse to die because they were born in the "wrong" place or let their children or little brothers and sisters starve because we decided to close one side of our nation's borders?

We can pretend that we are worried about "security" after 9/11, but that is a lie we tell ourselves so we may hide from our own bigotry. No one worries about undocumented Canadians. The people who flew planes into buildings were here legally. The young men who tried to destroy the Boston Marathon (and failed) were here legally. The men who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building were homegrown idiots, born and raised in our amber waves of grain. Perhaps if we want to be safer, we should consider increasing our flow of migrants, not try to shut down the best source of trade we have in the name of "securing our borders." What foolishness.

Look in the mirror after you read this. Tell yourself that if your children were facing savage civil war or brutal gang violence in Arizona and you could get them to safety in Mexico, that you would not cross a border checkpoint because it was illegal? That you would quietly wait while they were in danger or starving so you could get through the mile-long lines and years-long wait at the Mexican Consulate to get your visa?

Better yet, while you are looking in the mirror, ask yourself if you lived in Los Angeles, and the only jobs available were in Veracruz or Honduras, that you would choose to let your children, your siblings, your elderly mother, rot in poverty rather than making the trek south across the Rio Grande to make money you would send home? Ask yourself if you would choose to be a slowly starving, good little sheep and watch your little brother die of illness because you could not afford a doctor, or tell your daughter she could not learn to read because you were too afraid to go across the border and find work?

Ask yourself if that crossing would make you some form of pariah undeserving of the protection of the law, if it should somehow make you "worthy" of being placed in anything akin to the border gulags we run in the name of "border control?" That control was nonexistent a few decades ago because we, the good, law-abiding citizens of this country, needed our cheap labor supply to pick crops, pave roads, build homes, watch our children and serve our meals. Demonizing the people we pay to do this work seems both hypocritical and ungrateful. Worse, the politicos who exploit our fear of the same people and somehow losing "our" country thrive by appealing to the very worst in us. It keeps them in power, so I suppose it helps them, but it certainly seems to make us, well, either stupid or easily used.

I would prefer to be neither.

I would prefer to call these exploiters on their other lies - that these folks are somehow "freeloaders" who are a "burden" on our hospitals, schools, etc. At least here in Texas, the same working man, in the country illegally or without documents, or born here, who buys food, buys a car, pays rent and occasionally buys a pack of cigarettes likely pays a bigger share of his income in taxes than the giant corporation AIG did last year - and he did not need a bailout. So spare me the shrill cries that we are being taken advantage of. The only folks who are taking advantage are the politicians who feed this self-deception.

In this day, when we speak about the "freedom of capital" and "cross border" investment, what exactly is the rationale for allowing dollars, euros and pesos to cross borders freely, while making the labor that sustains these systems a criminal class?

If my family depended upon my willingness to trek a thousand miles or more, ford rivers or climb mountains, or cross deserts, I hope to God I would have the courage to do it. I hope to God that if I had to cross a border that, 150 years ago, belonged to the other side, I would do it.

I hope I would have the courage to enter this country illegally. I hope that would never change.